W. T. Martin received his B.A. in mathematics from the University of Arkansas in 1930. He did graduate work at the University of Illinois, where he received his M.A. in 1931 and his Ph.D. in 1934 under the direction of Robert Carmichael.[1] He studied under a National Research Council postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 1934 to 1936.[2] In 1936 Martin became an instructor at MIT and in 1938 a faculty member there. He collaborated with several fellow MIT faculty members, notably Norbert Wiener, R. H. Cameron, Stefan Bergman, and Salomon Bochner. During the 1940s Martin and R. H. Cameron wrote a series of papers extending Norbert Wiener's early work on mathematical models of Brownian motion.[3] During the 1950s W. T. Martin wrote with Salomon Bochner a series of papers that proved basic results in the theory of several complex variables.

Martin was the department head for the MIT mathematics department from 1947 to 1968. During this time he oversaw the hiring of 24 faculty members in the mathematics department. He initiated MIT's C. L. E. Moore Instructorship Program in 1949.[4] He spent his entire career at MIT, except for the years from 1943 to 1946, when he left MIT to become the head of the mathematics department of Syracuse University[5] and, in the academic year 1951–1952, when he was on sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study.[2] Martin did important editorial work and co-authored three influential books: Several complex variables (1948), Elementary differential equations (1956), and Differential space, quantum space, and prediction (1966).[5]

with R. H. Cameron: "Transformations of Wiener integrals under translations". The Annals of Mathematics45 (2): 386–396. 1944. JSTOR1969276. (2nd most cited of all Cameron and Martin's papers)

with R. H. Cameron: "The orthogonal development of non-linear functionals in series of Fourier–Hermite functionals". The Annals of Mathematics48 (2): 385–392. 1947. JSTOR1969178. (most cited of all Cameron and Martin's papers)